Retirement-minded Americans, particularly those over 50, want options to deal with market volatility and to stem their worries about cash flow. Simply put, when you’re planning for retirement, you want to know the money will be there when you need it.

Conventional investment advice says you should be a long-term investor. Because market returns will eventually revert to historical averages (also known as “returning to the mean”), it is typically recommended that you have a well-diversified portfolio, rebalance periodically, and stick with it.

This approach may work for younger investors. But if you’re a retiree or near-retiree, you have a shorter investment time frame. You don’t have 10 or more years to achieve historical average returns. You need to know you can withdraw from your portfolio now, if you’re retired. Or within the next five years, if you’re near retirement.

When the markets are down, being a long-term investor could force you to sell investments to cover living expenses, causing you to lock in losses (lose money) because you can’t wait for a return to the mean.

Don’t be a sheep
As you know, these are volatile times in the global financial market. “Buy and hold” investors, including some financial institutions, mutual fund marketers, and academics, have not been served well by blindly following the “stocks always go up over the long run” crowd. “Buy and hold” has become “buy and hope.”

Markets are forever changing, and financial advisors have had to adjust their strategies to reflect the short-term, round-the-clock trading activity of today’s markets.

Consider our approach
At Halberstadt Financial Consultants, we use an investment approach that takes the best of both worlds of (1) behavioral finance theory and (2) modern portfolio theory. Using this policy, we:

Get more defensive as markets rise and stocks become frothy
Become more aggressive as markets decline and fear pervades investors’ minds
Our policy has protected our client portfolios throughout the last decade. And we will continue to rely on this approach in these uncertain times.

While there may be other financial consultants who take this approach, find out some of the many reasons people like you choose HFC.